Basing Life on What You Can Afford
Every one of us makes money trade-offs nearly every day, whether we realize it or not. Residence over retirement. Later over now. Needs over wants. Faith over financial facts.
But all too often these trade-offs are subconscious, which means we don’t discuss them openly and fail to question them relentlessly.
The people you’ll encounter here have been sorting it out for themselves for some time now. Their household income is at or close to the median in their area — from Arkansas to Michigan, Indiana to California.
Meeting the most basic of needs is usually not a problem for these people, but it’s a challenge to figure out how often to allow themselves things they want and to weigh those desires against longstanding debt or the contributions they probably ought to make to their future
BRYANT, ARK.
For Married Veterans, Scarce Funds Mean Prioritizing
Sometimes Tanya Brashers can almost forget about the financial situation her family is in.
Tanya and her husband, Chris, are military veterans — Tanya is a former member of the U.S. Navy and Chris of the Marines — living in this bedroom community southwest of the state capital.
In mid-February, Tanya, 41, lost her $37,000-a-year job with a nonprofit veterans group in North Little Rock when grant funding dried up. In early April, the couple and their teenage son from a previous marriage must vacate the house they have been renting for $1,200 a month because their landlord plans to sell it. The couple has about $50,000 in student loan debt.
“The more I talk about our situation, the more grim it seems,” she said. “We prioritize everything: our rent and utilities and our food comes first … It’s a huge splurge if we go out to dinner or something, but we feel like it’s important to do that every so often. And I do feel guilty for it.”
The couple has decided to move to Fairhope, Ala., on the Gulf Coast, hoping it will bring new opportunities.
Tanya’s Arkansas social worker license is valid in Alabama. Chris, who has a degree in engineering but is trying to build a business as a freelance photographer, researched the area and thinks there are more freelance jobs there. They will also be near several military bases, an employment option if they cannot find full-time work, she said.
Money worries are not new to Tanya, who grew up in poverty in Yazoo City, Miss., in the Mississippi Delta. She remembers moving often as a child because her parents could not pay the rent. The water and electricity were frequently cut off.
Tanya said that growing up in poverty and seeing poverty every day had a significant influence on her political choices.
“Given that there are a lot of economic issues right now, social welfare programs are essential and help people from being homeless to keeping people from having their health become detrimental,” she said.
Money was also scarce during her five years in the Navy. “So you kind of get used to living very basic,” she said.
The first time in her life that she thought she had enough money was after she was discharged and moved to Reno, Nev. “I started to make good money in the civilian world … and I lived a little more lavishly, maybe too lavishly, and ended up in bankruptcy,” she said, and “then, of course, I reverted back to the basics again.”
Chris, 46, grew up in Arkansas; he also filed for bankruptcy after leaving the military because he lived beyond his means.
While Tanya no longer has a paycheck she can count on, she receives disability compensation of nearly $2,000 a month for a back injury she sustained during a training exercise in the Navy.
Chris, who served during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was also receiving $2,000 a month in disability compensation for a number of physical and emotional issues, including post-traumatic stress disorder. But in December, that payment was halted for six months after a paperwork error resulted in his being overpaid.
The couple has health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs; Tanya’s ex-husband covers their son’s insurance.
While they drive newer vehicles, they shop for things marked down to the lowest price and closely monitor their utility costs.
Chris said he is hopeful about their situation, and he likes a lot of what President Trump is doing. “Like wanting to renovate the V.A. system,” he said. “That would really impact us, but how is he going to do it?”
Tanya said she is not sure of their future. “We are happy with living simply,” she said. “We tried to find the least extravagant house in the neighborhood.
“I’m at peace with the fact that I don’t have to have a lot of money to be happy.”
Rob Moritz lives in North Little Rock. He has spent more than 30 years covering politics, state and local government and crime news for newspapers in Arkansas, Tennessee and Texas.
COLORADO SPRINGS
A Bisexual Teacher in Red Country Has a Mission
Avalon Manly is proud of who she is and what she represents as a feminist, bisexual, social activist, writer, artist and teacher living in the famously conservative stronghold of Colorado Springs.
And defying what she sees as an unfair image of her fellow millennials as “lazy and entitled,” Avalon, 27, works hard. She teaches at a Colorado Springs middle school. She also does “part-time pittance work” to bridge the gap between her $44,000 teaching salary, in an area with a median income of about $54,000, and her bills. She calls them “side hustles.”
“Every millennial I know has a side hustle or two,” said Avalon, who does freelance design work, editing work and writing. “I don’t know anybody who has one job and makes a living at it.”
She scrambles because she is digging out of a financial hole she created when she lost her job in 2014 and turned to credit cards to fill the gaps in her monthly budget. It’s a choice that taught her a particularly painful lesson in personal finance.
“There were months during the great season of unemployment where I would send out 15 job applications and then I would sit on the couch and have panic attacks,” she said.
Her months of “unemploycation,” as she calls it, began when she lost a teaching job just a month after making a down payment on a $162,000 townhouse. “I ran up about $9,000 on my credit cards that I couldn’t pay,” she said. Soon she was in crisis, facing a 30-year mortgage, $15,000 in student debt and her credit-card bill.
“I was really dumb,” she said, explaining how she took temporary and part-time jobs to generate income and negotiated with her bank and credit companies for relief.
“We live in this system that correlates wealth with character,” Avalon said. “If you are doing well financially, you must be a good person. And if you are doing poorly, you must be a bad person. What an unjust narrative that is.”
She might have recovered from her financial woes more quickly, but chose a lower-paying teaching job in a neighborhood with one of the lowest per-capita incomes and highest crime rates in the region, turning down more lucrative offers.
“My friends and I tend to be very activist, very passionate about people and passionate about doing meaningful work,” she said.
She admits she would fit in better in more progressive Colorado communities like Boulder or Denver, but she is committed to staying here. “My family is here,” she said, and she likes to be near them.
Avalon moved back after a three-year stint in New Orleans, where she taught in a poor public school as a member of Teach for America. And she is making no compromises as she plants roots here.
She says she will not change to blend into her upper-middle-class Briargate neighborhood, more famously known for Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family Christian ministry and the New Life Church founded by the evangelical pastor Ted Haggard, who was ousted in 2006 after admitting he paid for sex with a male prostitute and bought crystal meth.
Instead, she wants the community to adjust. “There are more of us here than people realize,” she said, adding, “We are working to change Colorado Springs.”
She is tempted to take higher-paying jobs, but says her work is too important to leave. She points to a seminar she led for new Teach for America corps members.
“We had a very real conversation about supporting queer kids,” she said. “It was hard to watch all the new teachers’ faces when we talked about the need to support queer kids in states that legislate against them.
